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Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 677 posts

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#21
post #13

Seems like a non problem. If it's a dull comment or just inane it'll get downvoted out of existence. If the bot actually produces something interesting about the topic, what's the problem?

I think it's a capacity problem. Right now, the "system" (legit HN users) have the capacity to deal with dull and inane comments currently provided by dull and inane human commenters. If the dull and inane comments become automated they can arbitrarily increase their number until the system lacks the capacity to deal with them.

If there was one or ten bad comments on this thread - no problem. What if there were ten thousand bad comments?

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#23
post #13

Seems like a non problem. If it's a dull comment or just inane it'll get downvoted out of existence. If the bot actually produces something interesting about the topic, what's the problem?

Not to take a side, but to answer the question: imbalance. It takes less than thirty seconds for a computer to generate basically any amount of text, faster than anyone else can formulate a response, faster even than anyone can read. It could theoretically swamp a topic.

Is that realistic? No idea. I haven't made up my mind on this topic yet.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#24
The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters unless we create some draconian real person ID system is a tragedy so great it's crazy it has not dawned on people yet.

I started out loving the net because of the feelings of connection and partly because of the honesty and discussions stemming from at least pseudo anonymity, both silly stuff and egghead discussions on history and tech - but i always felt a "human presence" and community out there behind the screens.

Now anonymity is dying and the value of discussions will plummet because you'll be just be arguing, learning or getting inspired from a selection of corporate PR bots, state sponsored psyopping or "idiot with an assistant" that will try to twist your mind or steal your time 24/7.

Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time!

I'm honestly having an existential crisis, the internets is already filled with too much noise and people are already lonely enough.

Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted..

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#25

Dr. Casey Fiesler recently tweeted > The @huggingface GPT detector works very well on ChatGPT-created text. I ran 5 student essays and 5 ChatGPT essays for the same prompt through it, and it was correct every time with >99.9% confidence. How about adding a %human/%GPT statistic to posts and comments?

HN doesn't update anything. That will obviously never happen.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#26

The comment section on HN is for comments and discussions of people so yes any form of generated responses does IMHO fundamentally disqualify. I mean to nitpick if a AI becomes sentient and flexible enough to be called a person and decides to comment on their own that would be fine. But when it comes to: - auto generating responses - hiring people to generate responses for you - anything similar to the other points I…

Yeah the last point is quite crucial. Should we ban things that are hard to enforce? Does that lead to selective enforcement by looking into responses you don't like?

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#27
One of my comments, in another thread, got called out for being a ChatGPT-generated response[1]. It wasn't; I wrote that comment without any artificial assistance.

A part of me felt quite chuffed to be accused of being the current hottest new shiny in tech. Another part of me - the poet part - felt humiliated.

If a ChatGPT comment ban does get put in place, please don't also auto-ban me by accident. I don't enjoy being collateral damage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33886209

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#29
Yes, ban it. I've been playing around with ChatGPT and where it starts failing is just where things start becoming interesting. What that means is that it's wikipedia-smart, i.e. it doesn't really tell you anything you can't find out with a minimal Google search. It does however cut the time-to-answer quite a bit, particularly if it's an area of knowledge you're not really that familiar with. But it bottoms out right as things start getting interesting, expertise wise.

Case example: I tried seeing what its limits on chemical knowledge were, starting with simple electron structures of molecules, and it does OK - remarkably, it got the advanced high-school level of methane's electronic structure right. It choked when it came to the molecular orbital picture and while it managed to list the differences between old-school hybrid orbitals and modern molecular orbitals, it couldn't really go into any interesting details about the molecular orbital structure of methane. Searching the web, I notice such details are mostly found in places like figures in research papers, not so much in text.

On the other hand, since I'm a neophyte when it comes to database architecture, it was great at answering what I'm sure any expert would consider basic questions.

Allowing comments sections to be clogged up with ChatGPT output would thus be like going to a restaurant that only served averaged-out mediocre but mostly-acceptable takes on recipes.

Re: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?

#30
post #13

Seems like a non problem. If it's a dull comment or just inane it'll get downvoted out of existence. If the bot actually produces something interesting about the topic, what's the problem?

I think it's a capacity problem. Right now, the "system" (legit HN users) have the capacity to deal with dull and inane comments currently provided by dull and inane human commenters. If the dull and inane comments become automated they can arbitrarily increase their number until the system lacks the capacity to deal with them. If there was one or ten bad comments on this thread - no problem. What if there were ten t…

But it has always been easy for simple bots to mass-produce bad comments. Nothing changes if they're still bad.

I'm concerned that too-well-written posts will be thrown out-- a race to the bottom in legibility and grammar just to make posts more human-like, even if written by bots.

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